British Red Cross

Taking the drama out of a paper crisis…

Industries:

Offering Groups:

Solution Areas:

Regions:

Challenges:

Make paper documents and photos easier to file, manage and send out to the media

Scan in press cuttings on a daily basis for reading over secure intranet

Reduce costs

Benefits:

Substantial savings in postage and fax costs

Better use of office space

Improved contacts administration

International aid agency British Red Cross use Fujitsu’s desktop scanner, ScanSnap to speed up and reduce the cost of paper distribution

The Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement is the largest independent humanitarian network in the world, with more than 100 million members across the globe. One of the most active members of this movement, British Red Cross is a leading UK charity with 40,000 volunteers working in almost every community.

Getting to the source of the problem
British Red Cross relies on donations to continue its vital impartial humanitarian work, so the job of the press office is to get The Red Cross seen and heard by potential donors as much as possible. The press office issue an average of 10 – 15 press releases a month - ensuring the Red Cross is mentioned in over 6,000 press articles a year.

It’s crucial that the press office deal with journalist enquiries and information requests quickly - The Red Cross can receive well over 50 calls a day during a major humanitarian crisis. Journalists frequently have tight deadlines that the press office has to meet to ensure they get as much valuable publicity as possible. With over 40,000 volunteers working on projects throughout the UK there are a lot of activities and projects to publicise, and huge amounts of promotional material to manage!

British Red Cross wanted an admin solution that would make paper documents and photos easier to file, manage and send out to the media. In addition, the department wanted to scan in press cuttings mentioning the organisation for staff and volunteers to read on a daily basis over their secure intranet.

Clare McNeil, Press Officer at The British Red Cross explains: “We needed to find a scanning solution that would quickly and easily convert paper-based documents into electronic files that could be distributed throughout the organisation and to third parties. Being a charity, we obviously needed a solution that was powerful yet inexpensive, which is why we chose to try Fujitsu’s ScanSnap solution.”

Instant results
“Once installed, ScanSnap was immediately put to good use and is now helping us in many ways. Now whenever we have any paper-based information that needs to be delivered to someone externally, we can just scan the documents into digital format and email them off. Scanning takes literally two seconds! Journalists now receive the information almost immediately and no longer have to wait for the next day’s post. We have saved considerable money on postage, and drastically reduced our fax costs.”

As space within the press office is at a premium, the size of the scanner proved to a real bonus: “Traditional flatbed scanners we have used in the past proved to be cumbersome to use all the time and it was difficult to justify the cost and space. But ScanSnap is so small, fast and easy to use it really has become an essential addition to my desktop! In fact, we are using ScanSnap to reduce the amount of paper we keep in filing cabinets which we hope will eventually free up more office space than we had before.”

Plans for the Future
“Our primary goal was to shorten the time it takes to send promotional material out to journalists and ScanSnap has really helped us with this. We’ve also experienced benefits we hadn’t even considered we would get with a scanner. ScanSnap’s Cardminder software enables us to scan in business cards straight into a database. This is so good for us as we’re always out meeting people at fundraising events and being handed cards that normally sit in a drawer. Now we can easily keep records of whom we’ve met and make sure no-one gets forgotten!”